OKCoin Becomes China’s ‘Largest Exchange’ With Its $10M Raise.

OKCoin Becomes China’s ‘Largest Exchange’ With Its $10M Raise.

Even with China cracking down on cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has managed to entrench itself into the very heart of the worlds second largest economy.

OkCoin, one of the largest Bitcoin Exchange to exist in China has recently announced a $10m Series A funding round. The campaign was led by Venture Capital firm Ceyuan and followed by Mandra Capital, Ventures Lab and a whole slew of other Angel investors.

Expansion.

This announcement has lead towards OKCoin being one of the largest cases of bitcoin financing so far, with the company becoming China’s first virtual currency platform.

Founder and partner at Ceyuan, Feng Bo, commented:

We are delighted to invest in the pioneer of China’s Bitcoin exchanges; given the company’s leadership under Star Xu and his team, we know there is much more good news ahead.

The newly acquired investment will be used to expand the team, increase security and research products.

China’s Crackdown.

During the previous year, Chinese authorities had bee instructed to force all third part payment companies from offering any clearing services to Bitcoin exchanges by January 31st.

Back in December, the People’s Bank of China had announced a ban on financial institutions that handled Bitcoin transactions. The central bank had declared Bitcoins as currency without any “real meaning”. This happened just as China had managed to become one of the world’s largest traders of the digital currency.

Afterwards, Alibaba Group Holding, one of China’s largest e-commerce business, had announced it would be prohibiting the sale of Bitcoins due to the PBOC’ issued crackdown. The ban in place did not only extend to the virtual currency itself, but to any manual and computer software that was related towards mining Bitcoin.